Summary Bullets:
• Cisco is leaning on technology partners focused on business and IT context.
• CloudFabrix brings AIOps capabilities to Cisco’s observability platform.
Enterprises have been pinning high hopes on the use of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize businesses from vastly shortening lengthy app development’ coding requirements to enabling operations teams’ use of automation for improving the cumbersome processing tasks involved in moving advanced apps through highly distributed environments. In this context, GlobalData has been discussing the prospect of modernizing IT operations through generative AI.
As leading application platform providers begin to roll out emerging DevOps-modeled platforms, the industry is now beginning to discover technology innovators who aim to leverage more popular and established platform players’ evolving solutions to help fulfill IT ops modernization.
CloudFabrix is one such startup that gained attention this week when it revealed how it’s hooking its AIOps technology strategy squarely into Cisco’s new full-stack observability (FSO) platform. Hinging on its robotic data automation fabric (RDAF), CloudFabrix earlier in 2023 indicated it would move the technology into the observability and OpenTelemetry realm as part of its plan to address enterprises’ desperate need for data-centric AIOps.
CloudFabrix is moving in the direction of observability and AIOps process via its product Macaw. The GenAI tool leverages RDAF, its own large language model (LLM) and Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI LLM to provide context for customer’s datasets. The technology targets multiple personas within operations teams as part of broader DevOps initiatives.
For its part, Cisco began focusing on the observability space in 2022 via its Telescope App brand, leveraging application performance management technology of its AppDynamics business unit. The app troubleshooting tool included search capabilities and connected insights across applications, and it was complemented by Panoptica App, a security app cloud service for APIs, serverless, and containers.
Earlier in 2023, Cisco evolved its modern monitoring approach via its FSO platform, reaching beyond app performance monitoring to include insights into the infrastructure on which advanced apps are being deployed (for more, please see: Cisco Adds Consolidated Observability to its New DevOps Portfolio, February 9, 2023).
The company recently noted that technology partners will play an important role in furthering its own agenda around app modernization and digital transformation, specifically in the area of business and IT contexts, including AIOps. Cisco, therefore, helped highlight CloudFabrix’s capabilities during this week’s high-profile conference.
Platform service providers and hyperscalers have been essential to business’ digital transformation initiatives; however, IT solutions have not always been optimized to support the agility needed for frictionless app deployment and operational efficiencies. Moving modern apps into production has not been easily achieved under current infrastructure configuration constraints, resulting in delays in moving DevOps methodologies forward. In general, newer efforts around infrastructure modernization, including the use of CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code techniques will be critical in making sure enterprises are better armed with tools that drive automation agilities and support advanced software architectures, including observability and application security.